DHCD Address Locator Tool - Guide to update files

2. Methodology

This section is organized in the following way: each source of information has its own section and has the code used to create the final dataset. This intermediate dataset can be downloaded as a .csv or .pdf. Each section also has an R script that has more information about each data source.

2.1. DHCD Payment Standards

The DHCD Payment Standard is given by the following file. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is divided into 23 Metropolitan areas and, for each area, there are the payment standards for the different number of rooms. The smaller geographical unit is the boundaries of a city or a town. In contrast, HUD SAFMR sets its Payment Standard based on zip codes. Smaller than cities and towns, but not as small as census tracts. The Address Locator Tool’s geographical unit are, indeed, the census tract. These differences between different geographical units presents a challenge in how to manage the data that will serve an input for the ALT. To update the DHCD Payment Standards file, there are several intermediate steps required to make the information useful.

2.1.1. DHCD Metropolitan Areas

The original file provided by DHCD is a Word document that defines which city belongs to each one of the 23 Metropolitan areas. To make this information more easy to use, it has been transformed into the following Excel file, called “Cities by DHCD Metro Area” . This file is the starting point for the upcoming analysis, our original file.

2.1.2. DHCD Metropolitan Regions

DHCD divides its operation in 8 diferent regions. The list that links each city to each region is published in this link. Based on the Original File, we added the DHCD Regions column.

2.1.3. Zip codes and counties data

In order to add the zip codes to the file from point 2.1.1, we retrieve information regarding the zip codes from the following website Zipcodestogo.com. That information has been cleaned and merged with the original file. Please note that there are many zip codes (and cities and towns) that do not have a DHCD Metropolitan Area assigned.

## Reading layer `ma_municipalities' from data source `/Users/lauticantar/Google Drive/DHCD-tool/data/shapefiles/ma_municipalities' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 351 features and 5 fields
## geometry type:  MULTIPOLYGON
## dimension:      XY
## bbox:           xmin: -73.50821 ymin: 41.23875 xmax: -69.92751 ymax: 42.88678
## epsg (SRID):    4326
## proj4string:    +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs

In order to check that we are covering the whole state, we run the following test. We downloaded a shapefile of all the municipalities in Massachusetts from MassGIS and compare the number of cities and towns between our original file and one downloaded. When we do this, we realize that the original file has missing cities and towns. There are 351 municipalities in Massachusetts and our original file has only 318, thus we are missing 33. As we can see in the map below, most of the missing information are cities from Franklin County.

2.1.4. DHCD Payment standards

DHCD Payment Standards are given by the following file. The following table has the same information but in a more organized way.

2.1.5. HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent standards

The HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent standards were downloaded from the following link Small Area FMRs ¹ and the resulting list is the following:

2.1.6. Final join

Merging all files to make up the final DHCD Payment Standard file.

2.2. GreatSchools.org data

Greatschools.org provides information about school quality and several other social and demographic indicators. The Address Locator Tool uses its data. To collect this data, we are going to use a “scraper” written in Python.

The final dataset has information for 5457 schools all across the state. You can download the data here:

Since our data has the latitude and the longitude of each school, the following map shows the location of it in the state.

2.3. diversitydatakids.org - Kirwan Institute Child Opportunity Index

The diversitydatakids.org - Kirwan Institute Child Opportunity Index is a comprehensive sociodemographic indicator that will be used as a proxy of the socio-demographic status of each census tract. The Child Opportunity Index combines 19 separate component indicators into a single metric: Very Low, Low, Moderate, High or Very High. For more technical information, click here.

The COI Index is calculated for 1368 census tracts, divided into four different metropolitan areas. In order to get the information for each one of the metropolitan areas, you will need to download the data from the following links:

The final dataset is the following:

2.4. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Data

From the (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing)[https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/4868/affh-raw-data/] data we are going to use the following five indicators:

Please note that values are percentile ranked and range from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better. For more technical information, please reference here.